How to Do Things with Art. Dorothea von Hantelmann
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conceive of a conception of an artwork, the museum and history that is based not on dichotomies of event and permanence but rather on their mutual, intertwining relationship? What sort of Zeitdiagnostik (time diagnostics) can be conducted by an art that is primarily event-oriented, that takes place as a momentary, instantaneous experience? Do means for an experience of history and historicity in art exist that are not bound to the object character of an artwork?
The oeuvre of James Coleman engages in a speculative discourse on these issues, both on a structural and topical level. Coleman’s work deals with the continuity of history and its suspension; it is both event-oriented and durational. Every work creates a scenario that—in regard to both its structural composition and its subject matter—provokes a reflection on the fleetingness of the moment and the possibilities of its endurance. Coleman’s work addresses historical and modern forms of representation; it reflects on the production of history and its spectacularization; it broaches the issue of recollection and memory and at the same time renders the impossibility of remembering a constitutive aspect of the work itself.
Coleman belongs to a generation of artists who confronted the legacy of Modernism. Having grown up with Minimal and Conceptual Art, i.e. movements that brought Modernism to an end, artists like Coleman, Graham and Jeff Wall have a heightened awareness of the reductivist qualities of Modernism, especially of its ahistorical and universalist tendencies. Attempting to reintegrate a historical dimension into art, Wall in the late 1970s embraces the historical gesture of painterly depiction, for example, he goes back to the tableau of Renaissance art.5 And from the mid-1970s Graham begins to incorporate more traditional forms of representation and narration into his art practice. When in the early 1980s a return to these conventions began to assert itself as a general traditionalism, however, artists such as Coleman, Graham and Wall had to face the question (that Walter Benjamin had already raised): How can one reference tradition without lapsing into a fabrication of history as an uninterrupted continuity?
Questions on how historical time can be reintegrated into art, how a consciousness of historicity is developed without fetishizing history, and how such a conception of history might be defined, were posed by many artists during this period. The impact of the Vietnam War and the radical social and political changes that shaped the late 1960s honed people’s awareness for experiencing history. In Coleman’s work, however, these questions have a specific framework that cannot be ignored. In no European country are contemporary politics so conflict-ridden as a result of history and the problems arising from its appropriation and interpretation as in Ireland. “Amnesia and nostalgia, the inability to remember and the incapacity to do anything else, are terrible twins,” 6 writes Terry Eagleton about Ireland, a country in which archaic and modern elements come together in a singular manner. Ireland is characterized by an uneven development between tradition and the modern age, which Eagleton (using Marxist terms) refers to as a “combined and uneven development.” 7 Modernization did occur in a number of areas (e.g. in parliamentary politics, in the colonial administration and in art), but in other areas the country lagged behind (industry, agriculture, education). This produced a dynamic, modern culture, which bears within itself tense contradictions between the archaic and the modern. The double bind between continuity and renewal, tradition and the modern, is a phenomenon historically anchored in this culture. Coleman takes up these contradictions—and through works that negotiate these tensions he introduces them into contemporary art.
Coleman’s early installations, produced when he was living in Milan in the early 1970s, explore the experience of time and recollection within a meticulously staged exhibition situation. Already these early pieces testify to Coleman’s interest in a subjective perception of time, an interest that anticipates his later preoccupation with the representation and experience of history. Flash Piece, a work from 1970, consists of different colored, alternately flashing light intervals, whose varying rhythms allow time to be perceived as something experienced subjectively.8 “In fact,” writes a critic, “the length of this duration, difficult to memorize, and its variable location within the cycle [ … ] lead to different perceptions of time.”9 In this work Coleman introduces the light flash as a principle that will play a significant role in later works such as Box (ahhareturnabout): the flash as an instantaneous, flashing moment that elevates time to a structuring principle of the artwork and simultaneously makes it appear to stand still for an instant. These moments are dramaturgically arranged time segments or time sections that generate a before and after, memory and repetition.
One year later Coleman produced the work Memory Piece (1971), in which the visitor listens to a tape recording of a text approximately four minutes long, which he or she can then recite from memory onto a second tape recorder. This second recording is then played to the next visitor who memorizes and recites it once again into another tape recorder, and so on. Produced and reproduced afresh each time the work is transformed through a temporal process involving appropriation and transmission. Maurice Blanchot once described the experience of an artwork as a presence that also is disappearance.10 Coleman is interested in the role that recollection plays in these dialectics of appropriation and loss, and how time shapes and influences it. It is in these non-linear and non-fixable to and fro movements of recollection that his exploration of a contemporary portrayability of history takes its point of departure.
Since the early 1980s, Coleman has produced elaborately staged slide shows accompanied by voice-overs, which he calls “projected images”: Living and Presumed Dead (1983–1985), Seeing for Oneself (1987–1988), Charon (MIT Project) (1989), Lapsus Exposure (1992–1994). In darkened, soundproof rooms often lined with carpet, several slide projectors coordinate the rhythmic sequence of a large number of images that appear and disappear, superimposed with other images and alternating with black transparencies. Technically, the “projected images” are subject to a linear, chronological process (one slide after another), but their dramaturgy is non-linear; it unfolds with forward and backward movements, repetitions, discontinuities and loops. Through their seriality, the individual images lose their stability, as if set in motion from the inside, rather than being blurred into an action or narrative. Not unlike a poem, the depiction seems condensed in a back and forth between current and virtual images, between present and memory. When recollecting the piece, one remembers not a sequence of distinct images but rather an endless variation of a single image. Kaja Silverman describes the work Initials (1993–1994) as a “single, long pulsating photo,” as if it were a single freeze-frame containing an infinite variety of potential different images.11
Many of Coleman’s works have as their subject matter performances and stage situations. There are scenes from a boxing match in Box (ahhareturnabout) (1977), in Living and Presumed Dead (1983–1985) a series of actors stand in a line at the front of the stage awaiting applause at the end of a performance, while a complex and dramatic narration unfolds, and in Photograph (1998–1999) students in glittery costumes practice for a dance performance. The actual event, however, the performance itself, is omitted in all these works. What is shown is the preparations and follow-up, the act of entering and leaving the theatrical presentation. Precisely because the depiction of the actual event is left out, or as in the case of Box (ahhareturnabout) rendered indiscernible, the experiential dimension of the artwork takes center stage. Above all the expressive, onomatopoeic qualities of the voice suggest a simultaneous presence of actors and spectators. It generates the illusion of a simultaneity of production and reception which is usually intrinsic to theater. Within the works conception—and this is what constitutes its aesthetic virtuosity—, the perception and experience of the work itself seems to be integrated, in effect something that in a visual artwork (in contrast to a theater performance) by nature takes place retroactively. “Why do you gaze one on the other?” asks the young girl in Photograph and “We were … being positioned. [ … ] Come into … the light,” says the voice in Background (1991–1994). By using such dialogue that seems to address the spectator directly, Coleman opens up the representational level of his work to the situation